The Best 4 Ways To Use Facebook Ads

FB ads

You did it. You started your own company. You created an incredible product, now all you have to do is wait and let the sales start rolling in. So you wait… and wait… and wait, but no one is buying.

How could this be? It may be that you’re targeting the wrong people. Customer targeting is arguably the most important thing for any business, and I’ll explain why.

Imagine if you created a fantastic dog training course. I mean, if people download this course, they could teach their dog to sing while doing a cartwheel.

There is no doubt that this is the best dog training course ever made… but you target cat owners. I don’t care how great this course is, cat owners will not be interested in a dog training course. 

Your job as a marketer is to deliver the right product,
to the right person, at the right time.

So how do you find these people who are ready to buy your products? You use Facebook ads of course. Through Facebook ads, there are 4 different ways that the best marketers use to find customers that are ready to convert.

Open Audiences

samuel pereira uf2nnANWa8Q unsplash scaled 1

An open audience is one that has one country (usually the US) and no audience, targeting segments, age, or gender selected. Now you may think that an open audience is too broad, but that’s exactly why we create it.

This is especially helpful when we don’t have any previous customer data or other conversion events. The open audience will serve as our benchmark audience, our control group, that you can judge the performance of other audiences off of. 

In some cases, your open audiences may even serve as a high performing target audience as it allows the Facebook Pixel to test multiple audiences and find what audiences get the best results. You can usually tell if the audience is performing well after 2 weeks, as that’s about the time the Facebook pixel needs to find the highest performing ads.

Interest Audience

An interest audience is the most common kind of audiences that are targeted in Facebook ads. This is everyone’s starting point. These are audiences that have a specific interest or behavior that Facebook has identified.

Anyone who offers a course on business mastery or how to run Facebook Ads will likely target people who are interested in people like Gary V, Tim Ferris, or Tony Robbins. Maybe they target people who are interested in or follow pages that cover small business owners or social media marketing. 

We create these interest audiences because they are the most readily available, and Facebook has already grouped together with an audience for you. Since everything is grouped, you can now test the Tony Robbins ad against the Gary V ad and see which audience performs better. Sounds great, right?

While the interest audience is convenient, it isn’t the best form of Facebook ads that we can run. The downside with this option is you are bidding for the same customers that everyone else is trying to sell too. This leads to much higher costs.

Also, if the audience size you chose is under a million people, then you can exhaust that audience very quickly. You only want to run these ads for 5-7 days before seeing which ad sets are performing the best and cutting the others.

Lookalike Audience

A lookalike audience is an audience that looks like our current customers who took action on our website. This could be a page view, an add to cart, or even a purchase.

This audience is usually the highest performing but the hardest to achieve (since you need previous data to create a lookalike audience). These lookalike audiences allow us to increase our audience and potential reach significantly.

Think about it. Imagine if you set up a lookalike audience off of purchases within the last 30 days. The Facebook pixel will always look at the last 30 days of information. So if you ran this ad on January 1st, Facebook would target people who looked like your audience that purchased from December 1st to December 31st. However, a month later, on February 1st, Facebook would be targeting an audience that looks like the people who bought from January 1st to January 31st.

So, as each month goes by, and different people keep buying, Facebook is always finding people that look like that audience. You can even choose different periods like 60 days and 180 days and experiment to see which look back period generates the best results.

As stated before, Facebook can only find a lookalike audience if there is previous data for it. You want at least 100 actions committed to the lookalike audience that you want.

So, you can’t set a lookalike audience up for purchases on your website if, over the past 30 days, you only had 37 purchases. You would probably have to start with page views, and then once more sales come in, create another audience for purchases.

Not only does this option help you find the most qualified people to buy your product, but it also keeps your costs as low as possible. Remember, if you’re selling a dropshipping course, and you target people who are interested in entrepreneurship, you are competing with a bunch of other dropshipping courses.

But, if you target people who look like your current audience, you have no competition because no one else can access that data besides you. Give this audience 5-7 days as well before you start cutting and scaling your best performing ad sets.

Retargeting Audience

We’ve seen these before. You saw a Facebook ad, and then you went to buy it, but then maybe something stopped you. You went to fill out your information, but then you saw that you had to pay extra for shipping or that there wasn’t a money-back guarantee, so you left. Then, like clockwork, you see an ad that says something like, “Hey, you. Forgetting something?” Then an image of the product and some ad text that says something like, “Use this code for free shipping.” These are examples of ad retargeting.

A retargeting event is when you target a customer who did any event outside of the optimization event that you set up for your pixel. To run these, you just create a custom audience for pageviews.

You can also experiment with testing deeper funnel events like a view content or add to cart and see which events lead to the best conversion rate and then cut the other ad sets. A great feature of retargeting campaigns is that they are VERY cheap.

You are only targeting people who have come to your site. So unless you are getting tens of thousands of people coming to your site each month, you never really need to spend more than $10 a day.

Key Takeaways

A mediocre product to the right audience does much better
then a great product to the wrong audience. 

The most important thing when selling a product or service is finding the right customer. The cheapest way to get your product in front of millions of customers is by running Facebook ads. The 4 different Facebook ads you can run are: Open Audiences, Interest Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, and Retargeting Audiences. They all have their pros and cons, and it’s up to you to decide which one is best for your business.